INTRODUCTION

Although the warrior was my favorite in Diablo 1, I prided myself on my ability to play the Rogue. She was the most fragile of the classes, and the least mighty. With the way that blocking in D1 is dex-based, you could play a Rogue with sword and shield and, as long as you played slowly, could tackle anything at all. I didn't realize that at the time, though. Didn't understand exactly what went into defense and blocking. I knew how to get enough to play the standard ways, though. In fact, as I disdain the idea of Telekill for the warrior, so I disdain equally if not more so, the idea of sword and shield for Rogue. Rogues to me mean bows. Period.

Give me high dex, a sturdy bow, and the Teleport spell, and I'm a happy Rogue. Don't need anything else. I mastered the art of maintaining distance, of utilizing cover. Naked (not enough defense to take a hit) was never quite relaxed or easy, though it was quite playable. Get some resists going (not even necessarily high resists) and 250ish Defense or more, and I could solo with a Rogue at HIGH speed, fighting large mobs. I preferred that to the slower, more precise variant play. The amount of risk you take can even be greater with stronger equipment, as the PACE at which you play is a prime factor in the true difficulty measurement. In my view, at least. Oh sure, I played Rogue variants. I did so in circles where nobody heard of such things, too -- not amongst a wider crowd who were all equally into variants. I was the first player that I knew of to 3dot a rogue solo through a full clear without dying -- but those were early, early days, long ago, and my exposure was limited to several hundreds of players, certainly a small pocket of the total.

There was a great joy to playing the bow rogue effectively, because she was so easily overwhelmed and swarmed if you didn't know what you were doing. The cheaters all played warriors, because once decked out in GPOW and ObsZods and such, you had a cakewalk everywhere but Hell/Hell. Legits mostly loved the mage, for his power. Strong Rogues were certainly uncommon, at best, and unheard of in some circles. Even cheating, you couldn't ease your way into mindless victories with the Rogue. You HAD to be able to play her, and that was kind of cool. Rogues had the highest percentage of legits, too, for that reason -- though not infallible.

Rogues also had two major builds, as opposed to just one for warriors and mages. Rogues were split down the middle between mana and life. You HAD to choose which one to focus on. Blue Rogues chose mana, and used mana shield. Red Rogues chose life, and used no mana shield. Each had their good points, vulnerabilities, idiosyncracies. At first I preferred the blue rogue, but later I would come to love the red better. Just shows my evolution as a player from preferring the mage to preferring the warrior, and the influences this had on my rogue playstyle and preferences.

The turning point for me with the Rogue came after I had 3dotted one, though. I thought I was pretty hot stuff, but somebody (a mage player) suggested an exercise for the Rogue: play her without adding to stats, ever. See how far someone could go on 20 30 15 20: save all stat points, don't use stat shrines, and see if the dungeon, or even the catacombs could be completed. Hmm. The idea germinated in my mind for a while, and then a friend and I decided to try it together.

A lot of replaying of areas proved necessary. Even riding on the very back end of experience, still playing on dlvl 4 at clvl 12, eking out the last of the easy experience. Equipment was slow going. To use better equipment, especially better bows, my Pointless Rogue (no points in stats, see?) had to find or buy usable equipment with bonuses to strength and dexterity. That wasn't easy and it came slowly. I was dying to find rings and ammies, but none dropped yet.

Suffice it to say that I took that character on to finish the game, to slay Diablo. I had one death, on dlvl 14 in Hell, to a Lava Maw. Item recovery there was quite a task. So was full-clearing. Not enough damage to stunlock most targets, not even with damage boosts from leveling up. Enough mana for ONE stone curse, low level at that. (Reading glasses were allowed, but I only had what items I could carry, and I needed temporary items just to put on more temporary items just to equip my real gear, and I had to carry cash, too). Diablo was a tough, tough fight, but I pulled it off.

By that time, I had learned (through necessity, the mother of invention) a whole lot more than I ever expected about crowd control, pacing, frontage, timing, resource management, off-screen fighting, and on and on. Conservation was NOT my watchword. Rather, I used lots of potions and took care to stay alive. But it didn't stop there. I took the character all the way on through nightmare, too. That's apparently small change in the minds of a few old variant players, but it was a big deal to me and the people I played with back in 97, 98. (This was done in early 98). More to the point, it took away all my fear. I learned much more about myself as a Diablo player than I learned about the game. I found my own limits, figured out what I could handle, what I could not, and how to tell the difference. As such, after that, I just don't die much. Even in BAD situations, I don't die often. Usually when I do, it's from some threat I've not faced often enough to know how much respect it actually deserves. That, or sheer risk-taking (ala Softcore Wussie).

It was after that that I managed to solo the Ants Nest with a rogue and live through it. (Ants Nest = H/H dlvl 15 populated by Burners, waking the entire level via teleporting around before proceeding to attack any enemies). Once you've played this game out and "beaten" it, you can either go into treasure hunting mode, where you seek to perfect your particular item collection, or variant mode, where you seek to challenge yourself anew with some particular exercise or variant character. In D1, I did both, actually. In D2... I have no interest in the treasures.

Fast Forward to summer 2000. I'm looking forward to two things: playing a Warrior in D2 (or something close) and playing a Rogue. I'm hoping the paladin will play like the warrior, the amazon like the rogue. I would be deeply disappointed with both, sadly. Not that they aren't good classes in themselves, chock full of potential fun, but... they AREN'T the warrior and rogue. Period. They are not. They are not even close. They aren't in the same ballpark, OK? They don't compare at all. Sorry.

Thus, my first char was a paladin, my second an amazon, and I played mostly pals and amazons and one barb my first few weeks. The barb was the first to 1dot (laggy realms, ack) because, well, barbs were easiest to play. :) At the time. But lag and other factors eventually led me to the sorcie, and that was the first class in D2 that DID play mostly like a D1 char, the sorcerer. And for that and about a dozen other reasons, I moved into playing sorcies more than anything else, because FOR ME, they had the fewest arrgh factors, even though they were the weakest laddering class and, at the time, much maligned.

The factor missing for the warrior was precision. Lack of precision in fights, hurt significantly by meaningless armor, 4xAR, insane clvl-mlvl penalties for those who don't sandbag endlessly, a complete bias against melee across the board in the game design, and the fact that client-server automatically penalizes melee styles in a way that ranged builds will never feel -- a total lack of precision for the warrior playstyle, may it rest in peace. The power of the Barbarian class was Leap Attack and Whirlwind. Um... those are magely skills, OK? Not melee. I wasn't interested in that, still am not. My highest WW barb is clvl 33 -- and he got erased off USEast for inactivity.

The Amazon is missing far less, but what she IS missing is the one ESSENTIAL ingredient to the effective bow rogue: teleport. Oh sure, the amazon's got all those crappy skills (crappy in a good sense, as in very effective kind of "hey, this is great, except it's not a Rogue" kind of crappy). She's got invulnavalks to hide behind, especially in large games. She's got ice arrow, guided arrow, immo arrow. Worst of all, she's got multishot and strafe. Arrgh. Nice skills, but WAY TOO MUCH OFFENSE. Dammit, that's NOTHING at all like a rogue. Nothing. You can't even call them both bow users. The Amazon is a bow-mage, not an archer. She summons a fat blonde golem. She casts spells that turn one arrow into a spray of twenty, and can rapid fire those. She can pierce targets, etc etc etc. Nothing like a Rogue, dammit. Blah blah blah, the art of the Rogue is lost in D2. Gone. Even worse, these players don't even know what they are missing.

I'd gladly trade in all that fancy offensive power for the teleport option, for less monster blocking, an end to the clvl-mlvl penalty (although you can use Fire Arrow to get around that), and I'd take a weaker Valk, too. Just, dammit, GIVE ME MY TELEPORT. Arrgh.

So out of longing for the Rogue playstyle, I shunned the Amazon. I took a few through Normal, but never enjoyed their stronger-offense at the cost of lack-of-mobility sluggishness, and the whole hide-behind-the-invulnaminion arrangement. So all my rogues-- er, oops. (I wish they were Rogues!) All my Amazons sputtered out as the curve came into play, and my attention was captured by other builds I found more entertaining.

Fast forward to 2001 now. D2X beta is here, and with things like teleport amulets, new items, true immunity, tougher Hell difficulty (for full-clear players, at least), and so on, my potential interest in playing an Amazon, full out, unrestricted type of character, was renewed.

That brings us to Dizzy Girl. She's unrestricted in items, skills, hirelings, the works. She will be completely free. But... I've still got to make it interesting. And how can I do that without crunching her actual in-game playing effectiveness? The automap.

See, it's like this, OK? I play like a bat. I play with echo location running all the time. I have the automap up, usually faded to its lowest brightness (although I use F10 and turn it up in a few places where the map is notoriously hard to see, like the Maggot Lair, Kurast Sewer, and the Halls under Nihlathak's temple). I have the map up, up ALL THE TIME, and I barely even look at the screen. I hardly even glance at monsters. I'm busy watching my location on the automap and managing my entire character that way. Echo location: it's far more effective for me than direct eyesight.

That's why I compare myself to a bat, see? Bats have good eyesight. They see just fine. "Blind as a bat" is not very blind at all, you understand. (That's just a stupid cliche). But see, bats are nocturnal, and they don't even BOTHER to use their eyes much, because their ears are so much more effective at "seeing" anyway. They use echo location, equivalent somewhat to radar and sonar, sending out squeaks and listening for the rebounding sounds, and they can "see" the shape of things far better that way than with their eyes. So why "look" at all. They see best by listening.

Well, that's me in Diablo II. I don't even look around much. I'm playing via echo location, through the automap, and it works very well for me. Only half my attention is on the actual screen, even during a fight.

So I wondered what it would be like to play blind. Oh not visually blind, but with my sonar blacked out. No map, ever. I'd have to navigate by visual clues, surely enough, but I already know so many details about this game, I'm better armed than most to go mapless. What might I learn by doing this? And what interesting challenges might this pose? Would it make me a better player, or just be an interesting sideshow for a while?

Who better to play in the dark than an otherwise unrestricted char build with uber potential? So what the Hell. Thus, Dizzy was born. My Dizzy Girl. I have her automap options COMPLETELY disabled. There are no keys or buttons which trigger any map functions. Not even by accident or force of habit will I so much as glimpse the map. Not a single echo will I hear. I will have to use my eyes for once, as I play... to watch the PLAYFIELD, not the map, and that's going to be interesting, for sure.

I still miss the Rogue. In fact, I miss her so much, I designed the next closest thing and played that. Maybe I'll tell you more about that later, and elsewhere, as it has nothing to do with Dizzy.

So... on with the show.

- Sirian

| Dizzy's Page | Next Chapter | Expansion Page |